the concurrent product development process

THE CONCURRENT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS Antonio Hidalgo (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Fernando Aldana (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and Darius Singh (AUT University)

Abstract

Trade barriers have largely been removed through free trade agreements and economic blocs, not only in Europe but also world-wide. Manufacturers are finding that their distinguishable markets are swiftly evolving into a single, global market place. This can create new business opportunities but, on the other hand, the domestic markets are no longer protected as more and more companies are competing internationally. To compete in this new scenario companies are increasingly focused on covering all aspects of product development process as their core business, and decentralising other tasks using business units, which operate more or less independently. Product development process in extended enterprises is increasingly organised in networks of suppliers, manufacturers and users, evolving towards service companies.

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Principles of product development

The old proverb “customer is the king” is even more true in the current environment where instead of buying whatever the manufacturers decide to produce, the customers require products tailored to their particular needs and tastes. European enterprises are expanding globally and now have different world wide sites for developing products, manufacturing and marketing. Growing global competition as well as new regulations and laws concerning environmental issues, quality issues, etc., have lead to dramatic structural and technological changes within industry. In this context, extended enterprises are becoming an extremely important organisational concept. An understanding of attributes of successful new products in extended enterprises is central to obtain an effective new product management. It provides insights for executing new product projects (i.e. are certain best practices strongly linked to success?) and yields clues to new product selection (what is the profile of a winner?). These success factors can be approximately divided into two groups (Cooper 1993; Cooper 2001):

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• Process attributes - those factors that capture the nature of the new product process and how the project is undertaken. These are often controllable factors (i.e. doing projects right). • Selection attributes - those factors that describe the new product project and its situation. These tend to be outside of the control of the project leader and team but are useful in project selection (i.e. doing the right projects). The keys to new product success (critical factors of process attributes) are based on numerous research studies into why new products succeed, why they fail, and comparisons of winners and losers. The most revealing of these studies have been the large sample, quantitative studies of successful versus unsuccessful new products. They began with Project SAPPHO in the early 1970s (Rothwell et al. 1974), followed by the NewProd series of studies, the Stanford Innovation Project, and more recently studies (Maidique and Zirger 1984; Cooper 1995; MontoyaWeiss and O´Driscoll 2000; Daneels and Kleinschmidt 2001; Calantone et al. 2003; Dröge et al. 2008). To summarise, a winner product is superior to competing products in terms of meeting users’ needs, offers unique features not available on competitive products, solves a problem the customer has with a competitive product, provides excellent relative product quality, reduces the customer’s total costs (high value in use), and boasts excellent price/performance characteristics. Not only must the product be superior, but it must also be launched, marketed, and supported in a proficient manner. These elements include brand name or company reputation, superior marketing communications (advertising and promotion), a good sales force or distribution channel, superior technical support and technical service, or simply product availability. The limited evidence available, however, suggests that the impact of non-product advantage pales in comparison to the impact of product advantage (Crawford 1992). Product development is very much a team effort. Do a post-mortem on any bungled new product project and invariably you will find each functional area doing its own piece of the project, with very little communication between players and functions, and no real commitment of players to the project. That is from a typical pattern of inadequate people resources devoted to the project with players having numerous other functional tasks underway at the same time. Product development in extended enterprises must be run as a multidisciplinary and must have a good organizational design that means (Cooper et al. 2002): • The project is organized as a cross-functional team with members from research and development (R&D), product engineering, manufacturing operations, marketing and sales, operations, and so on. • The team is dedicated and focused (i.e. devotes a large percentage of its time to this project, as opposed to spread over many projects). • The team members are in constant contact with one another, via frequent but short meetings, interactions and project updates. • There is a strong project leader who leads and drives the project.

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A second organizational success ingredient is climate and culture. A positive climate is one that supports and encourages intrapreneurs and risk-taking behaviour, where new product successes are rewarded and recognized (and failures not punished), where team efforts are recognized, rather than individuals, and where resources and time are made available for creative people to work on their own “unofficial projects”. Idea submission schemes (where employees are encouraged to submit new product ideas) and open project review meetings (where the entire project team participates) are other facets of a positive climate. Finally, there are four factors that describe the new product project and its setting - critical factors of selection attributes (Cooper 2005). Unlike the ones above, which are process related, the factors below are less controllable by the project team and they tend to be more useful as project selection criteria. These factors are: market potential, competitive situation, product life cycle and synergy or leveraging core competences.

2 Methodology of new product development in extended enterprises The product development literature has given increasing attention to firm-level considerations of an organization’s new product efforts. In the extended enterprises the actors of new product development are members of a variety of firms, with different cultures, different systems, speaking different languages and using different concepts, differently named. At this level, new product development may be defined as the aggregate pattern of product introductions that emerges from the organization over time. In that perspective the methodology of new product introductions in extended enterprises is based on five specific approaches: product strategy, advanced product planning, product cost management, market analysis and process coordination.

2.1 Product strategy Product strategy provides the focus for the extended enterprise’s new product efforts and is manifest in its pattern of sequential product introductions. The purpose of an extended enterprise’s product strategy is to link its products to their overall objectives and to assist in the search for new products. To characterize a new product, usually three key dimensions are suggested that hold significant strategic implications for firms: newness of embodied technology, newness of market applications, and innovativeness in the market (Meyer and Lehnerd 1997; Wonglimpiyarat 2004; Lawley 2007). Nowadays new trend in strategies for innovation is linked to the enrichment of the product itself adding and embedding in it some services or knowledge that make it more significant and attractive for

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the customer. An example comes from the automotive sector where the car is becoming a knowledge intensive product offering many services to the customer (i.e. satellite based navigation system, more passenger entertainment, etc). Basically, four generic design functions of a product, each emphasizing a dominant attribute, can be identified: technology centered, marketing centered, image centered and user centered. The precise combination of these will vary according to product, but all should be closely integrated. Divisions often exist between technology-centered aspects of design products and manufacturing, marketing demands, and ideas about styling. All too often, user needs are subordinated to available technology or attempts to create a superficial image for purposes of differentiation. This push approach to production and marketing has obvious limitations; one research program revealed that, in over half the projects studied, products needed redesigning by the time final prototype testing took place, since customer requirements were found not to match those originally planned after concept evaluation (Bonnet 1986; Khan 2004). In terms of its essential contribution to product development in extended enterprises, three major functions of industrial design can be identified: • Giving a product concept tangibility, which is a vital stage in translating from an abstract idea to an actual form as perceived by users, thus enabling decisions on the feasibility of ideas to be more firmly grounded. • Form of a design has important implications for manufacturing feasibility and therefore cost. Identifying any incompatibilities, or need for new equipment or supplemental processing (machining, polishing, coating, rework, etc) at an early stage can be a vital element in costing and decision making on a project. • Reality of a design and its value as perceived by users is the ultimate determinant of market success and should be the core focus of any development process. Product models and product families, long and widely accepted in practice as basic units of analysis, have recently begun to receive attention. Model distinctions and family relationships are fairly easily established for sophisticated technical products, particularly assembled systems (Rothwell and Gardiner 1988; Burgelman et al. 2003). Having established product models and families as our units of analysis, it is appropriate to analyze each in terms of variety and rate of change in order to arrive at an integrated picture of an extended enterprise’s pattern of product competition. In Figure 1, which presents the sales history for a family of related models, each model has its own model life cycle. An extended enterprise’s product family life cycle is the aggregation of these model cycles. The model variety available to customers at t, for example, is 12. We can estimate model variety thus only if the boundary of the product family is known, which reinforces the need to attend to industry criteria for family membership.

5 Fig. 1. Product family life cycle.

Model lifetimes can be used to generate a rough estimate of the rate of serial model change, that is, the rate at which a model is being replaced. This can be approximated by the reciprocal of the model’s lifetime. Model with 2-year lifetimes, for example, will be replaced at a rate of 0.5 models per year if existing model variety is to be preserved. Beyond the competitive patterns within individual product families, extended enterprises have a larger opportunity to develop multiple product families simultaneously. These can be plotted in terms of variety and rate of change. For simple product families, the product model and family life cycles are essentially the same. For most other products, patterns of family evolution are independent of, and can be quite different from, patterns of model evolution. Product families that replace one another in rapid serial fashion exhibit a generational pattern of evolution. One might find in successive generations of a product family, for example, any or all of the four patterns of product model evolution. The logic advanced thus far suggests three criteria for generational product evolution: • Powerful and persistent market demand for continuous improvement (without which major change will not occur). • More than one technological way to satisfy the market need (given only one technological approach, generational model evolution will dominate). • Strong market resistance to the simultaneous existence of more than one product family (without such resistance, turbulent product family competition will result).

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2.2 Advanced product planning Accelerated product development is particularly important to extended enterprises that are committed to pioneering. Pioneers are the first entrants into a market with a new product or a new generation of product. A common characteristic is that they have a high tolerance for risk. As the first entrants, they have a monopoly position until a rival emerges. This position may lead to a leadership reputation and enable premium pricing and may lead to the pioneering product establishing itself as standard. For products with high switching costs, pioneers can secure their position by creating a large installed base before significant rivals emerge. The experience gained from the pioneer’s lead may also translate into a cost advantage or a sustainable lead in technology development. Finally, the first entrant often has first access to actual experiential customer feedback. Having the ability to rapidly translate this new market knowledge into the next generation of product means that the pioneer is more likely to continue to satisfy market needs. There are seven characteristics of businesses that have achieved relatively short product development cycles. These characteristics have been identified in recent studies (Zirger and Hartley 1996): a market-oriented product definition process, dedicated and cross-functional project teams, predevelopment planning, overlapping development phases, focussing on core competences, incremental product development based on reuse and leverage, and accessible organizational memory. Managing the cycle time for the development of new products should not be viewed in isolation from the larger issues and concerns confronting the business. The long-term success of an extended enterprise depends on a stream of new products - some replacing older ones, others pioneering new markets, and all satisfying customer needs. It is this stream of new products, exploiting advances in both product technologies and technologies used to manufacture, distribute, and provide support that provide the fuel for corporate growth and renewal. But the most important indicator of success in terms of cycle time is not the schedule to slip rate of any single product but the ability of the firm to introduce a stream of exciting, value-rich products over time. Successful product developing extended enterprises must create robust product families. Product families do not have to emerge one product at a time. In fact, they can plan so that a number of derivative products can be efficiently created from the foundation of common core technology. We call this foundation of core technology the “product platform”, which is a set of subsystems and interfaces that form a common architecture from which a stream of derivative products can be efficiently developed and produced. A platform approach to product development dramatically reduces manufacturing costs and provides significant economies in the procurement of components and materials because so many of these are shared between individual products. Figure 2 represents a single product family starting with the initial development of a product platform, followed by successive major enhancements

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to the core product and process technology of that platform, with derivative product developments within each generation. Successful extended enterprises continuously renew their platform architectures and their manufacturing processes by integrating advances in core product and process technologies. Fig. 2. Product family evolution, platform renewal and new product creation

Add to this figure greater depth and you end up with the framework shown in figure 3. At the top of the figure are the market applications of the extended enterprise’s technology. The market for the product family is defined in a traditional way through a matrix of market segments that identifies particular user groups and product price and/or performance characteristics. The market applications of a product family take the form of derivative products based on product platforms. Most corporations tend to view their market segments in isolation from one another. Simply placing these segments on one page may allow management to then consider how product technology and manufacturing processes can be shared or made common across product lines serving different market segments. In the middle tier are the extended enterprise’s product platforms as defined earlier. Every company must determine precisely the structure of the product platforms suitable for its business, e.g., those subsystems and interfaces that are the essence of the stream of products or services it provides. Product platforms capable of accommodating new component technologies and variations make it possible for firms to create derivative products at incremental cost relative to initial investments in the platform itself. This is possible because the fundamental subsystems and interfaces of each new derivative are carried forward. Since the costs associated with the carried forward elements are essentially sunk costs, only

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the incremental costs of creating variations to them accrue to the derivatives. Typically, these incremental costs are a small fraction of the cost of developing the original product platform, leading to what may be called “platform leverage”. Product platforms can also improve development cycle times of derivative products by facilitating a more streamlined development process and more frequent model changes (Clark and Fujimoto 1991; Ulrich and Eppinger 2007). At the bottom tier of figure 3 lies the heart of all product development activity: those core technologies and competencies in product and process arenas that are brought together to form a current generation product platform. We think of technology as the implementation of knowledge with the potential to be incorporated into a product. Product technology takes many forms: chemistries, programming languages and algorithms, hardware or logic design, and so forth. The building blocks are the essential components within the subsystems of product platforms. Product technologies also include subsystem interfaces, their proprietary connections or those based on regulatory imposed standards. Fig. 3. An integrative model of product and process innovation

2.3 Product cost management Product cost management is generally approached from a strictly internal point of view. From this perspective, the management of costs is typically limited in scope to materials, labour, production, research, distribution, and other such costs of producing and distributing a product (Shank and Govindarajan 1988; Burgelman et al. 2003; Tucker 2008). While the management of these internal costs is certainly critical to achieving a desired level of profitability, it is also

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important to consider the total cost of a product to the customer. Customer costs include, in addition to the purchase price, the cost of acquiring and installing a product as well as costs related to using, maintaining, and disposing of a product. Consideration of these post-purchase customer costs, along with internal product costs, can provide a more complete approach to product cost management. The cost management process includes three inputs: technology, production, and systems. Each has a meaningful effect on the three major areas of product costs - customer costs, variable costs, and fixed costs. Effective management of these inputs and areas of cost has the potential to lower customer costs, which can translate into increased customer demand, and indirectly lower a business’s variable and fixed costs, which, in turn, contributes to greater profitability. The first step in the product cost management process is to understand how technology, production, and system inputs affect the three major areas of product cost. To achieve a meaningful reduction in any of these areas requires management of one or more of these inputs. Technology is the first of the three product cost management inputs. Product, process, and information technologies each have the potential to lower product costs and customer non-price costs. Gains in any of these broad areas of technology can reduce variable costs with lower unit manufacturing, distribution, and inventory costs. Technology inputs can also be used to lower fixed costs associated with product development time, marketing, and product administration. These technology inputs also have the potential to reduce customer non-price costs through product designs/redesigns that lower the customer’s costs of acquiring, installing, using, maintaining, and/or disposing of a product. There are three production inputs that have the potential to lower product costs (Best 2000). The first of these is economies of scale. A production capacity of 2X will achieve a lower unit cost than a production capacity of 1X. However, to achieve a lower unit cost, a business has to operate near full-production capacity. A business with a 2X production capacity that operates appreciably below that capacity could actually have a higher per unit cost than a competitor with 1X capacity that operates near full capacity. Product line scope is another production input into product cost management. As more products using similar product designs or processes are added to a business’s product line, the unit manufacturing cost of each product is likely to be reduced. This is due to the purchase and manufacture of common components or subassemblies in larger quantities as well as providing a higher utilization of capital equipment. Thus, product line scope has the potential to lower unit costs, which impact prices (a customer cost) and margins (a profitability component). Learning through production experience also lowers the unit cost of a product. As a business learns more from the experience of producing a product, there is a tendency for the unit cost of a product to decrease exponentially. For example, most microchip production plants are on learning curves near 70%. This means that, every time the cumulative production experience for a specific product doubles, the unit cost decreases by 30%. Thus, production experience (learning)

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also lowers unit cost, which could lower customer costs (through lower prices) and/or improve profitability (with higher margins). Systems inputs can be derived from three major areas - manufacturing, purchasing, and distribution. Systems such as just-in-time inventory management, materials resource planning, CAD/CAM design systems, outsourcing, and shared production each offer product cost management opportunities that could lower customer costs and business costs. For example, a more efficient inventory system could lower customer acquisition costs, since customers would be able to reduce inventories of a purchased product. Likewise, a more efficient distribution system could lower transportation costs, which could lower customer acquisition costs as well as a business’s variable transactions costs. CAD/CAM design systems and outsourcing have also been shown to shorten product development time and the fixed cost of product development, which could benefit customers with earlier access to better or lower-cost products as well as benefit a business with lower fixed operating expenses.

2.4 Market analysis The combination of unique product benefits at a specific price creates a particular product position relative to competing products. However, being distinct and different in price and product benefits is not sufficient for success. To be successful, a business must create, communicate, and deliver a product position and a value proposition that is appealing to target customers and differentially superior to competing alternatives. The product positioning process consists of the following steps: • Inputs - This is where the product positioning process has to start. A technologically superior product that does not meet customer needs will result in limited customer demand and economic failure. To be successful, product positioning must deliver an attractive combination of customer benefits at an acceptable cost or an attractive cost with an acceptable level of customer benefits. Customer benefits can include hard benefits such as operating performance, reliability, durability, and value-added features, and soft benefits such as local buying and customer service, accompanying software, on-line technical support, product warranty, and manufacturer reputation. • Product positioning - A product position built around superior product benefits can often be attractive to target customers even at a price premium. Conversely, a product position built around a lower price can attract customers when product benefits match that of competing alternatives. A value proposition is a short statement designed to communicate a business’s product position to target customers and it highlights key costs, benefits and how the customer should derive increased value from their product (Band 1995).

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• Outputs - To attract customers, a product position must deliver a superior value relative to competing alternatives. This means that the overall benefits derived from the product must exceed the total cost of purchase. A potentially attractive product position will fail if target customers are unaware of a product’s value proposition or cannot easily and fully utilise the product. Achieving market penetration requires an attractive product position and marketing effort (Best 2000).

2.5 Process coordination Effective product development requires the integration of specialized capabilities. Integrating is difficult in most circumstances, but is particularly challenging in extended enterprises with strong functional groups, extensive specialization, large numbers of people, and multiple, ongoing operating pressures. Before starting the process of developing a new product, it is essential to establish mechanisms to allow an effective coordination between project team members. This is unlikely to happen unless we provide the basis for communication between workers so that they get motivated into teamwork. Contrary to what we expect, if there is a lack of communication, we will have people reaching their own conclusions and working independently. One of the most powerful resources for enabling rapid development is the use of cross-functional teams which include representatives of all the disciplines involved in the innovation and which have the necessary autonomy to carry out the project. Teams of this kind are not formed simply by grouping people together; successful practice involves extensive investments in team building, providing them with the necessary training to solve problems, to manage conflict, to interact with other parts of the organisation and with outside stakeholders. Empowering teams and providing them with autonomy and resources will only work if they have a clear sense of direction. One important way of providing this is to involve them in the process of vision-building, evolving the product concept in the context of a clear understanding of the underlying business drivers and competitive realities. Closely linked with the concept of team working is the need to get a good match between the demands of development and the operating structure which enables it. Traditionally the choices were between functional teams, crossfunctional project teams or some form of matrix between the two. However, in recent studies two models emerge which appear correlated with success in extended enterprises: • Heavyweight product manager structure - essentially a matrix structure led by a product (project) manager with extensive influence over the functional personnel involved but also in strategic directions of the contributing areas

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critical to the project. By its nature this structure implies considerable organisational authority. • Project execution teams - a full-time project team where functional staff is seconded from their roles and areas to work fully on the project, under project leader direction. Associated with these different structures are different roles for team members and particularly for project managers. For example, the heavyweight project manager has to play several different roles, which include extensive interpreting and communication between functions and players. Rather than being either neutral or a facilitator with regard to problem solving and conflict resolution, the leader sees themselves as championing the basic concept around which the platform product is being shaped. They make sure that those who work on subtasks of the project understand the concept and they play a central role in ensuring the system integrity of the final product. Some of the ways in which the heavyweight project manager achieves project results are highlighted by the five following roles: direct market interpreter, multilingual translator, direct engineering manager, programme manager in motion, and concept infuser.

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The ICT tools and the new products development

Actually, the fact is that in our increasingly saturated markets the list of requirements attached to a successful new product is continuously growing, as well as the list of the potential stakeholders. Superior products, lower costs, and shorter development time are a cocktail which has prompted a revolution in the organisation and technologies for development. To cope with this situation new paradigms have appeared and become almost the standard. The new paradigms while meant to boost the chances of success of a product addressing all problems at the earliest possible stages have greatly increased the complexity of the process. The drive of the extended enterprises to concentrate on core competencies has added a further complicating dimension. The new paradigms are based on the following methodological and organisational concepts: • Design by platform, whereby a whole family of products is designed at the same time. This is meant to protect the brand image and to minimize manufacturing costs. • Modular and concurrent design to minimize the time and cost of product development. • Reengineering of product design process, where the process is modelled and optimised using modelling tools. • Knowledge based design, whereby experience and competencies, beyond data, are made available and leveraged to improve effectiveness and efficiency. • Simulation applied to all envisaged processes.

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For all the above reasons, new product development has become extremely complex, requiring an easy and seamless access to extensive knowledge, together with high control and coordination capability and superior simulation tools. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have provided a tremendous variety of tools with varying degrees of scope and generality. The purpose of this section is to provide a possible taxonomy, a quick overview of these tools and to put them in the perspective of an extended enterprise. The proposed taxonomy reflects a user’s point of view concerning the available tools and systems. The idea is to group the solutions according to the provided group of functions: • • • •

Tools which supporting the execution of a new product task. Tools which supporting the planning and the control of the process. Tools which supporting the cooperation among actors. Tools which supporting the management of information.

The above classification is useful to separate the different groups of functions provided by the ICT tools, but it does not easily map into the existing commercial tools. With the exception of the first group of tools, the commercial systems tend to offer combinations of these functions within the same application.

3.1 Execution supporting tools - Modelling and simulation tools CAD is used as an input for a great number of CAE simulation tools which address a variety of problems in a number of technological domains, measuring the product performance or simulating the manufacturing process. CAE tools are available to evaluate fatigue, vibration, noise, lighting, etc. Famous and ancestral programs such as NASTRAN are used to perform the structural analysis at a very detailed level, while simpler analysis can be carried out by ABAQUS or ADAMS. CAE tools are increasingly used to simulate an increasing number of manufacturing processes, such as metal stamping (OPTRIS, SIMEX, PAMSTAMP), plastic injection (I-IDEAS, C-MOLD, FABEST), casting (MAGMAsoft, ProCAST, Flow3D), welding, etc. The use of CAE tools makes the predictive assessment and virtual analysis of manufacturability of a product well before committing resources and requesting quotes or issuing orders to the suppliers. Current product development systems use CAD packages with CAE software and have been doing so for a number of years. So there is now a seemless data transfer and acceptability of a range of file formats, mesh types and operating systems. The above are process simulation tools. Other tools are available in the market to simulate discrete operations as they are performed in an assembly line. Layout and ergonomics can be studied in great detail, as well as the control software of a robot (ROBCAD). The performance of a production line can be studied as a function of the components, the control algorithms, the failures distribution using simulation software such as ARENA, WITNESS, PROMODEL, etc.

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The above sets of tools, which aim at the simulation of the individual processes and of the entire factory are referred to as Virtual Manufacturing. Digital Mock Up (DMU) plays an increasing role in the design of complex systems requiring a strong interaction with the users. DMU is capable to include the users in the new product development, well beyond the more traditional focus groups, and can provide the user a feeling for the product, both from the aesthetic point of view (geometrical DMU) and the dynamical point of view (functional DMU). Cost modelling tools are meant to support the designer with an estimation of the costs to be incurred in the manufacturing stage. They belong to the simulation tools in the sense that they produce a key performance indicator which is among the most crucial. Different tools apply to the different development stages. Parametric and analogical cost tools apply at the offering stage, while at later stages analytical tools are more relevant, when more details are available for the product and the attached processes.

3.2 Process planning and control tools - Business process modelling tools Modelling a new product development provides a clear picture of the process. Some of the tools support the simulation of the process which provides the overall achievable performance. But the representation of the process is likely to suggest improvements which may be not obvious at first sight. For all these reasons Business Process Modelling (BPM) tools are most often used for business process reengineering. But the scope of application of BPM is much wider. In some applications a process model is used to plan a development process before releasing for actuation. BPM tools are also the vehicle for the integration of enterprises process -enterprise integration-, as mentioned elsewhere, supplying the necessary orchestration infrastructure. However such an orchestration assumes stable and well defined processes, which hardly applies to the new product development for a variety of reasons: • Firstly, for all the modelling efforts there are features in the new product development which are difficult to capture, such as the continuous exchange of data and feed backs which are typical of concurrent engineering, or the conditions which trigger the start of an activity. • Secondly, the process is more related to a problem solving process, where trial and error is the rule rather than the exception. This gives the process a degree of uncertainty which is difficult to represent and predict Inside this group of tools it is possible to include Project Management (PM) tools and Workflow (WF) tools. PM tools support the actual (re)planning of a

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process, by managing the activity priorities and the resources attached to them. Among the most effective tools are Primavera, OpenPlan, and Artemis. MS Project 2000 is high in the list due to its widespread use, overcome only by MSEXCEL. WF tools are for the actuation of the planned process. A workflow brings the information to the people who can act on it and by this means forces the job and deadlines, priorities, responsibilities more easily and transparently into the actors. Although based on an assumed process, WF allows for condition based routings to specific individuals or groups of individuals. Several types of Workflow tools exist ranging from cooperative and administrative to ad-hoc and production depending on the frequency and value. Among the more popular commercial tools are MQ Series of IBM, InConcert, and STAFFWARE.

3.3 Cooperation tools - Computer supported collaborative work communications New product development processes require a frequent interaction among actors, both to carry out an activity and to deal with decisions and feedback. Typical systems (phone, fax, e-mail, audio and video conferencing, and chat lines) have greatly contributed to reducing development times and costs. Their general purpose matches quite well with the unstructured character of most new product development activities, and for these reasons Computer Supported Collaborative Work Communications (CSCW) are among the best tools for cooperation: • Synchronous cooperation tools support the work of two or more actors on the same document and they work one at a time, releasing the control to others. Examples of these tools are Net-Meeting, eVis and Co-Create. • Asynchronous co-operation tools support the cooperation in the sense that data, also centrally managed, are updated by the allowed actors, and the variation is notified to all interested parties.

3.4 Management of information – Product management systems There is much knowledge to be used from the accumulated knowledge along the product lifecycle. Modular and platform approaches require the access to past work and solutions. To capitalize all this knowledge a strategic requirement is to store product data concerning design, production, maintenance, etc. and to retrieve it when needed. Product Data Management (PDM) is the solution provided by ICT. Applied to new product development process, PDM provides a centralized repository where

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all versions are safely stored and accessed by authorized persons. Documents of all kinds are grouped according to relationships established by meta-data and attaches to each component all relevant engineering and manufacturing data, tracking versions, effectiveness and design variations (originally meant for managing engineering documents, Product Data Management has been extended to product data over its life cycle, and in this form it has been rechristened PLM Product Life Cycle Management). Thanks to this features, PDM supports concurrent engineering and asynchronous work cooperation. Some of the best tools on the market are eMATRIX, WindChill, IMAN, and ENOVIA.

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